Formating your custom calculations

When writing a document in any Word Processor such as Word you are performing two conceptually distinct tasks, composition and typesetting. Composition refers to the text itself, the actual words used to express your ideas and the logical structure of the text. The structure includes the division of text into paragraphs, sections, chapters, headers, and so on. Typesetting refers to matters such as the choice of font family and the way in which structural elements will be visually represented on screen or when printed. Should headings be formatted in bold or italics? Should text be left or centre justified? And so on.

When writing a document you should be primarily concerned with the composition of the text, what information are you trying to convey to the reader? One of the problems with a WYSIWIG ("What You See Is What You Get") word processor is that the tasks of composition and typesetting are rolled into one. You type your text and you are immediately given a visual representation which corresponds closely to what will be printed. It is all too easy to be distracted from the composition of the document in favour of making typographical changes to the document, "I'll emphasise this text in bold", "I'll use a larger font for this text because it's a heading", and so on. This ad-hoc use of formatting makes it difficult to keep the formatting consistent within your document and to make subsequent changes to it.

Paragraph styles

One method Word provides for managing your documents structure is Paragraph Styles. Paragraph Styles are named collections of formatting characteristics that can be applied to a whole paragraph. If a paragraph uses a particular style then changing the style will change all occurrences of that style within the document to show the new formatting. For example if you wanted to include pass/fail calculation checks you might want to format this text using a larger font size than the normal text. To achieve this using styles you could create a style called Calc Check and then assign that style to all the pass/fail statements in your calculations. If you later decide that you want to highlight all your checks in blue then you only have to change the formatting of the Calc Check style once instead of every check in your calculations. More importantly by using named styles you have also created an additional level of structure to your document, you not only have paragraphs you now have different types of paragraphs.

Tedds paragraph styles

The document templates included with Tedds provide a common set of Paragraph Styles some of which are no longer generally used but are retained to ensure compatibility with existing calculations. Typically new calculations only use the styles listed in the table below.
 

Structural characteristics of paragraph styles

Paragraph Styles are not just restricted to formatting characteristics, they can also provide additional structural information as well as hints to Word which enable or disable certain features.
The Outline Level defined by each paragraph style is used by Word to determine a document's hierarchical structure. Outline Levels are used by several Word features including Table of Contents and the Document Map or Navigation Pane. Tedds Calc Sections are created using the 'Calc Section' style which is defined as level 1 and the heading styles then use levels 2 to 4. The Tedds Paragraph Styles also define whether the text in your document is spell checked. The styles used for writing actual calculations "Calc 3 Column", "Calc 4 Column" etc. have spell checking disabled whereas the styles used for headings have spell checking enabled.

Character styles

In addition to Paragraph Styles Word also allows you to define Character Styles. When a Character Style is used the characteristics are applied to the selected text instead of the whole paragraph. Tedds doesn't define any new Character Styles beyond those defined in the standard Word templates, for example 'Strong' and 'Emphasis'.

Summary

The composition of your documents is of primary importance if you want to create well structured documents which are easy to work with and to amend. Try to use Word's support for Paragraph Styles and Character Styles to help you structure your documents and avoid using the bold, italic, underline and other font commands to apply formatting directly. Tedds includes its own set of styles to get you started but you can add whatever additional styles you need to create more structured documents.